Mr. Seamus Hoyne:

I will continue on that point. Then I will return to the question about windows. In the deep retrofit pilot scheme that was run by the SEAI, there was a requirement for the retrofit co-ordinator organisation to install monitoring and metering equipment in a percentage of the deep retrofit buildings. There is experience of doing that. One of the challenges in installing metering and monitoring equipment is that it becomes quite expensive. A potential approach, which could be pursued through the one-stop shops or a parallel SEAI scheme, would be to look at the funding, monitoring and metering systems that we would put into a portion of buildings in order to gather data. That would become available for use by researchers and would also be provided to the industry, to the manufacturers and to the contractors in a useable manner. Then we could start to get the segregated data that could also look at traditional buildings.

I will return to the question about windows and what the best approach is. The typical approach for a one-stop shop is that the assessor who visits the home will do the survey and look at the fabric. As part of that, they will look at the window condition and at the conditions in terms of airtightness, the seals of windows and other aspects.

That information feeds into the overall assessment of the building and the retrofit measures that are proposed to the homeowner. The typical model is that we do the survey, we make the suggestions to the homeowner, we give them an indication of the investments costs for the particular measure and the carbon and the energy-saving benefit of those measures, and recommend a suite of measures for that homeowner, which may or may not include window replacement. I will give a practical example. My home was already at a C3 energy rating when I did my Superhomes retrofit, which was my guinea pig retrofit in 2015. I was one of the first homes to do so. My assessment of the window conditions, and working with the assessor, was that a full replacement was going to be prohibitively expensive because my energy consumption was relatively low already. We did a glazing upgrade and we did an airtightness upgrade around the building. We have issues with thermal bridging but the cost of fixing those was going to be prohibitive. My building is now an A3 rating from both a BER assessment and from an operational energy consumption assessment because I marry the two. It is possible to do a deep retrofit without upgrading the full glazing, but it is case by case and is advised by the energy assessor who does that work with the homeowner at that particular time.